I Am China (39 page)

“Right … I didn’t know.”

“She left two days ago.”

“So she does live here? Deng Mu?”

“Yes, the Chinese woman with long black hair, works for a shipping company in China—do you mean her? She’s just with us temporarily—our lodger.”

The cat miaows again somewhere in the kitchen. Then the animal saunters out, a black cat with sparkling green eyes, and weaves itself in between its owner’s legs.

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

The foreign man shakes his head.

“Right. Thanks …” A pause. Iona asks with uneasiness: “Has she ever talked about another friend—a Chinese man. I thought she might be living with him.”

The foreign man scans Iona up and down with increased suspicion. Still holding the door ajar, he nevertheless seems friendly. “No. There’s no one else here. Just me and my wife.”

A woman’s voice in the flat calls the foreign man in a language Iona doesn’t recognise.

He turns his head and shouts back an incomprehensible sentence.

Iona feels it’s the moment to leave.

“Thanks, I’ll contact her when she’s back.”

The foreign man nods his head, closing the door. Iona waves her hands, squeezing out a polite smile.

Now standing in the courtyard among chained bicycles and rubbish bins, Iona looks up once again at the third floor, the green door and the windows of flat number 35. She notices there is a wilted plant sitting by the window. A strange emptiness fills her. The world seems to fade out around her, leaving her bare and alone on a deserted square.

As she walks back down the concrete steps, more slowly and with none of the adrenaline-rush excitement she had on the way up, she thinks of Jonathan. She tries to turn away from him, this married man, but she cannot remove his image, or expunge the feeling that fills her body like dye staining a still pool. “I’m thinking of shelving the project.” That’s how he refused her, in his way, both on a professional and a personal level. Now she is not even useful for the project. This is what it’s like to be expelled from the kingdom once and for all, she thinks. Though this will never be acknowledged except by her, with a mute bitterness too vague to be given words. He is probably oblivious to her now, back at home after work, making dinner with his wife of twenty years, his kids jumping around his knees, adoring their father-idol and
asking him for all the things a daddy is supposed to do and give; and he is probably discreetly planning to publish someone else’s biography, Gaddafi’s, Castro’s or Putin’s, or some other big shot. Such a picture of domestic perfection and professional success appears before Iona in the twilight, with the damp beginning to send its cold fingers crawling over her shivering skin.

Iona sits on a bench in the courtyard of Thistle House for a while, until an African family comes by, two small kids showering each other with playful blows. When the kids spot her, they stare at her as if they know she is some sort of spy, someone who doesn’t belong to this building or this dark-skinned community. Iona turns and leaves the courtyard. On the way back, she passes an old Chinese man. Thin and short, he is carrying a Tesco shopping bag in each hand; she turns her head, watching his bent frame disappear into a side street, against the hard glow of the street lamps, turned on early on this winter afternoon.

4
CRETE, NOVEMBER 2013

Why are there no songs in my head any more? Like Rimbaud in Africa who gave up poetry for gun running. Like the Misty Poet Hai Zi who decided to leave the world behind, lying on a railway track. And I’ve lost the need for music. Or maybe it’s that the music doesn’t need me any more
.

A phrase from Dante came to me earlier: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Am I entering Hell? Is this blue sea Hell, the Circles of Hell under this white sun?

The diary Jian is writing now he will never post to Mu. Nor will Jonathan or Iona read these words until it is much too late. As he scribbles on the white page, sunlight burns his eyes. The sunny hours feel longer here than Jian’s days in England and France. Time stretches and slows down, like the shadows of the poplar trees lingering forever on sun-bleached walls and facades. The sun is frozen on the olive groves and cypress branches. Like some aged horse, the bus travels slowly from Iraklio to Rethymno. There are very few passengers. A sense of self-abandonment wraps around the single Chinese man, it dissipates into the thin air of this island, becoming the very air he breathes into his lungs. No one is in a hurry on the bus; it is as if the bus itself knows there’s nothing to hurry for, nothing waiting at the end of the line. Just another evening, another night, another day. Just the shadows projecting shapes from a slightly different angle of the sun.

As far as Jian can see, this Greek island is no poorer or richer than anywhere else he has been. Dark-skinned old men walk around under the low winter sun, or sit and contemplate. One wonders how much influence the outside world has on the locals. Picking olives from the
same olive tree, walking the same hills their ancestors walked—does the outside world really affect their day-to-day life? Jian still remembers those lines from Confucius’s
Book of Odes:
“We get up at sunrise, at sunset we rest. We dig wells and drink, we plough the fields and eat, what is the might of the emperor to us?” If the old sayings are right, does that mean all his struggles are pointless, even foolish?

Jian tries to think clearly, but he is too tired to think. He closes his eyes, drifting into sleep. In his folded arms lies the third volume of
Life and Fate
; he is on the very last section. The book has grown mouldy, the cover has crumbled and fallen off, and the Chinese title has become unrecognisable.

5
CRETE, NOVEMBER 2013

Crete is in the middle of the Mediterranean, but for Jian it feels like a forgotten island adrift from the world. He remembers being stuck in the detention centre, reading about Napoleon and the island of St. Helena. The memory disturbs him and he tries to stop himself thinking. Here, too, the weather is extreme. Rainstorms arrive after a hot morning, raindrops like a vast wet curtain sweeping through the island, blasting the yachts and the pine trees and every living creature on the land. Occasionally, children swim in the bay with water-wings on their arms, but they are called back by their parents when the rain starts. Cars drive away from the beach, ferries leave. Nature knows well how to scare the humans away.

Living on a boat is not a long-term plan, but so far this is all he has found. It looks like the boat has been abandoned: spiderwebs crisscross the ceiling of the cabin and knot in every corner. Reeds grow wild all around. It’s a very old sailing boat, all broken down. Inside, the living space has a narrow built-in bed and resembles the sleeper compartment of a train. Lying on the bed, hearing the sea lapping right beside the boat, Jian feels fine and safe. There’s little chance that someone will come to arrest him or accuse him of stealing their property, but he’s not planning on staying long anyway.

Hidden inside the boat, beside the ravaged pages of his Russian novel, is Jian’s journal. It is his sole companion.

So many people died in Volumes One and Two that when we come to Volume Three the dead are no longer mentioned—the Russian soldiers, German soldiers, the people of Stalingrad, the Jews in the gas chambers, the sons and the daughters and the mothers and the commissars, let alone everyone starving on the collective farms
.
I wonder how many Chinese men and women have read this book; it would be devastating for the Chinese: the true sorrow is that the hero loses his faith. In the end he cannot believe in either communism or nationalism; the people in the book are left alone without belief and without their loved ones. Do ideologies die as people die? I hope so, for the sake of peace
.

So hear me, this is my confession: ideology is a slaughterhouse. And I have been living in this slaughterhouse from the very beginning
.

In years to come the old Greeks on this island will be gone, just as the old Chinese will disappear, the old French, the old English, and the old Germans … all of them will die out. Humans will be no longer. Only the sea will
ta ma de
senselessly stay
.

Jian falls asleep. For hours he doesn’t move, not even to wave away the last of the summer mosquitoes or scratch himself. It is as if he were already dead. The storm lingers, wrapping itself around the island, the forest, the town. Jian wakes up, shivering with cold, completely soaked, the boat filled with water. Later he finds some plastic sheeting to cover the boat, and he bails out the water with a bucket.

In the middle of the night, the rain and wind subside. There is no cry from the seagulls, no human voices from the shore, not even a dog barking. Every living being seems to have been scared off by nature’s ire. Under a moon slipping into the west, Jian thinks of those Communist officials in
Life and Fate
—how familiar they appear to him! He sees his father as being in the mould of the true Stalinist. He sees how the man has always held on to some cruel weapon or other, snatching power, terminating those who have threatened him, even his wife and his son, in order to build his empire.

6
CRETE, NOVEMBER 2013

In a nearby village, an old couple seem to be the only people who can be bothered to talk to Jian. Perhaps it’s because he mentioned that he used to live in Grantham and the couple are English. Slough is the town where they were both born, but is not the place they have planned to die. There is Hugh, who is about eighty, and his wife, Rosemary, a few years younger. They moved to Greece fifteen years ago when they retired. They weren’t rich, but they had enough money to buy a modest house with a big garden. Hugh was in the RAF for nearly twenty years, he says. He tells Jian that he used to smuggle diamonds and gold from Angola when he served as a pilot. It was Angola, the gold country, which burnt his skin, but also seared its way into his heart. Hugh says he made a lot of money, but then lost everything a few years later: risky investments with dubious bankers and investors. Still, his face now seems serene, if somewhat wizened. A wry smile crackles under the mahogany-coloured skin and lined cheeks. Rosemary likes to offer the Chinese man her lemon cheesecake, or fruit cakes made with fruits from the garden. She is proud of their little plot. But in Jian’s eyes, her pride is too light—built as it is on almost nothing: just the ownership of a lone English-speaking house on an isolated Greek island.

Still, life goes on, at least for some people. Each morning Hugh walks his two dogs, and then swims in the afternoon, even in winter when it is not too windy, his brown body like a naked Don Quixote’s. His wife moves her old skeleton about, white beneath paper-brown skin, tending her courgettes and tomatoes. Then she’ll gaze onto the beach from the garden, listening to the BBC in the shade. “The sea is too
rough for me now,” Rosemary says to Jian, “but I used to be a good swimmer, I used to swim in the river and the boys would stand by the bank, impressed by their old mum.” Rosemary has this typical educated Englishwoman’s composure; she looks like a white colonial landowner in Kenya, spry and graceful but sharp as a knife, ruling her sun-baked farmhouse.

“You don’t miss your country?” Jian asks in his humble English.

“No, Jian. Thank the Lord, Hugh and I don’t need to stay in miserable cold England any more,” Rosemary says, her eyebrows moving very slightly. “What about you? Do you miss China?”

“Yes—” He stops there. There is too much to say.

“Then you should go back.” Hearing no response, she continues. “Are you visiting Europe for a short time, or are you planning on staying?”

“I don’t really know,” Jian answers, with some difficulty.

He gazes at Rosemary’s garden, thinks of the effort she puts into this small vegetable patch—every day watering it under the hard relentless sun, maintaining the well-structured grape vines, the tomato plants and red peppers, weeding the herb patch, repairing the shed, painting the stone walls. Does gardening make her feel rooted to this place? That this might be home? He thinks of the peasant farms on the outskirts of Beijing. The labour is much harder there, but the great care that is taken, mixing human intention with earth and water, is the same. The idea of working on their soil brings forth fruit from the ground; the idea also roots the people to their land.

“You remind me of my youngest son, Matt. He’s a musician. His career has taken him to many exciting places. Now he’s gone to Japan, the farthest place he could go! Well, you’re still young, Jian, you’ve got plenty of time to wander around and find what you have to find. I would do the same if I were young.” Rosemary pours Jian some tea. “Would you like another piece of cake? It’s rather good, even though I say so myself.”

Jian shakes his head gently. His throat is knotted. His head is heavy.
The English lady enters her kitchen and fetches something. Moments later, she hands Jian a small plastic bag. “Chocolate shortbread. I baked it yesterday.”

Jian wants to embrace Rosemary. But his body is stiff, as if the wind had frozen his limbs in one position. His brain is telling his arms to move to her, but despite all his efforts only his fingertips manage to touch her sleeve. Ever so lightly, he pinches the soft fabric of the old lady’s blouse. No words come. Rosemary is looking at him sympathetically, barely breathing. Pausing as if time itself had thickened, pouring more slowly through their veins.

Later he finds himself walking slowly back to his boat. It’s quite a long walk, especially as he has chosen to pick his way along the heavy, waterlogged beach. As his sandals move through white sand and lapping water, he realises that a melody from an old song is looping in his mind. It’s one of his. He wonders why it has come to him now, out of nowhere, like a homing pigeon flying to its master, who has long thought it dead, or has forgotten it entirely. They’re lines he wrote long ago, in college. Lines he wrote for someone called Mu. “Yellow Dust on Your Black Hair”—that was the title and the first line. It’s like a dream; almost a dream of a dream. He sees the character of her name:
, and a face somehow merging with the character, covering it, like the gossamer threads of a spiderweb. The lyrics of the song seem to speak to the moon-shaped face, and through the character
he seems to clasp the face close to him.